Jim Loehr shows audiences how to focus and concentrate to increase productivity and meet the demands of modern life. Faced with daunting workloads and a rapid-fire pace of life, we are all looking for ways to improve productivity and well-being. Author of The Power of Full Engagement and The Power of Story: Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny in Business and in Life, Jim Loehr says the key to enduring high performance and achieving health, happiness and life balance, is not just time management, but energy management. An expert in the field of performance psychology, Loehr has spent 25 years helping the world’s greatest athletes to perform more effectively under brutal competitive pressures and now uses that training to coach the people he terms “Corporate Athletes.” Loehr appears frequently on television, including Today, Nightline, 60 Minutes and Oprah and his work has been chronicled in leading national publications including the Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, Time, Fortune and Self. Author of 12 books, Loehr offers step-by-step approach to managing energy more skillfully, both on and off the job.

TOPICS

Energy, not Time, is the Fundamental Currency of High Performance in Business
Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of performance and the most precious gift we have to give. Productivity, as well as health and happiness, are grounded in the skillful management of energy. To be fully engaged means to be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and fully aligned with the company’s mission. Each individual represents a cell of potential energy in the larger corporate body. Great leaders begin by effectively managing their own energy. Great leadership is marked by the capacity to mobilize, focus, invest, channel and renew organizational energy in the service of the corporate mission. Just as individuals have a pulse, so too does the corporate body. The skilled management of energy fuels a strong and vibrant pulse and a fully engaged workforce.

The Pulse of High Performance: Life is a Series of Sprints, not a Marathon
The conventional wisdom is that the best way to manage the endless demands of our work lives is to assume the mentality of a marathoner, conserving energy in order to stay the course over many years without burning out. In fact, sustained high performance requires the mentality of a sprinter – fully engaging for clearly defined periods of time and then strategically recovering. To live like a sprinter is to break work down into a series of manageable intervals – fully engaging and then fully recovering. This principle is called oscillation and it creates a powerful pulse that drives greater efficiency, improved health and happiness, and sustained high performance.

The Power of Full Engagement®
Nearly 75 percent of American workers are disengaged, according to data collected by the Gallup Organization. To be fully engaged, one must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with the mission of the organization. Drawing on 25 years of experience working with world-class athletes and other elite performers, this presentation describes a unique science-based system for driving full engagement, grounded in the management of personal energy, and the development of highly precise performance rituals.

The Making of a Corporate Athlete®
As demand accelerates, many executives lack the capacity to sustain high performance – especially under pressure. The creators of the Corporate Athlete performance model, described in a January 2001 Harvard Business Review article “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” argue that in order for executives to achieve sustained high performance, they must learn to train in the same systematic ways that elite athletes do. This requires drawing on four separate but interconnected sources of energy to achieve sustained high performance. This presentation outlines the multidimensional training strategies adopted by executives and managers at more than two dozen Fortune 100 companies.

The Fully Engaged Leader
The most important dynamic of leadership is the ability to ignite, focus, and sustain people’s energy in the service of a mission. The fully engaged leader must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with the corporate mission. Each of these capacities are necessary, none is sufficient by itself. The fully engaged leader learns to draw on all four sources of energy and to consciously cultivate them throughout the organization. Doing so requires leaders to be committed to training in the same way elite athletes do to expand capacity both individually and organizationally.

Biography

Jim Hight retired after a 33 year law enforcement career of which more than 24 years were in the service of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He also served more than 9 years with the Overland Park, Kansas Police Department as a Detective and Sergeant. Jim currently heads Hight and Associates, a security, investigative, anti-terrorism, counterintelligence and media relations consulting group based in the Midwest.

Jim was the supervisor of one of the FBI’s elite Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s) and oversaw intelligence gathering of terrorist threats, hostile intelligence services and important criminal cases. Assigned to the Oklahoma City Field Office on April 19, 1995, Jim was designated a case agent for the Oklahoma City bombing from 1995- 1997, remaining on the case through Timothy McVeigh’s trial and conviction. In 1997, Jim was promoted to Supervisory Special Agent and served as an instructor and faculty member at the prestigious FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. Jim, who has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, taught interview/interrogation, informant development and communications skills to new FBI trainees as well as a variety of courses, including media relations, to those attending the FBI National Academy, comprised of high ranking officers from local, state and international law enforcement agencies.

From 2000 until his retirement, Jim was involved in National Security and Cybercrimes cases, supervising both an elite JTTF and a Cyber and Crimes Against Children Task Force. He oversaw intelligence gathering not only against terrorism subjects, but against Intelligence Officers and their parent intelligence services, many from countries whom the State Department designated as sponsors of terror. Jim was involved in many highly classified investigations regarding terrorism, the compromise of national security information and the theft of economic secrets by foreign powers. As a JTTF supervisor, he was in a unique position to see the development of the Bureau’s JTTF’s from their infancy to the powerful counterterrorism tool they have become today. Jim also saw first hand the successes and failures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the inner workings of both the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR) and the FISA Court itself.